Managing your Coming Calendar DST Update Storm: Using Rhino to Auto-Accept

If you are not worried about Meeting Updates for the coming DST change in Exchange, please skip to some other blog.


You can use the Sumatra Utilities /a flag to accept updates (though we'd recommend this mainly for conference rooms and resources).


The Rhino Event Sink can automatically accept for all users on your back end servers. As an event sink it operates as the meeting updates arrive server-side on the user's inbox. This means updates can be accepted or tentatively accepted with NO USER INTERVENTION.

It differs from the Microsoft Auto-Accept Agent in that the AAA is asynchronous and must be registered on each mailbox. Rhino is a synchronous event sink and needs to be registered only once on each back-end server. Rhino also gracefully handles the situation where users have Delegates to respond to calendar invitations.







You can use Rhino with some caveats:

1. Rhino can Accept or Tentatively Accept -- but it does not recreate the original response if it were a Decline. We do not have this restriction during a calendar server migration but we have complete control over that situation and we got the same advance notice you all did of the Microsoft DST Update method.


2. If you are running Cached Exchange Mode do not enable "Replies" processing, that will result in users getting conflict messages due to an Incremental Change System (ICS) issue in Exchange 2003 sp2


3. You can limit Rhino processing to a defined Group.
4. Exchange 2003 only (Sorry Exchange 2000 users but the Sumatra Utilities will happily work in that environment).